New Yorker Repeats False Claim that James O'Keefe Stalked ACORN in a Pimp Suit
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Rebecca Mead's New Yorker profile of conservative online media mogul Andrew Breitbart repeats the false claim that his protege, provocateur videographer James O'Keefe, impersonated a pimp to infiltrate the offices of the anti-poverty, pro-voter registration group ACORN.
Here's how Mead describes the incident in her May 24th article:
Breitbart’s biggest scoop thus far has been a series of videos made by a twenty-five-year-old activist named James O’Keefe, which was posted on Big Government last September. O’Keefe, along with Hannah Giles, then a student at Florida International University, travelled across the nation and entered several offices of Acorn, the community-organizing association, with a hidden camera; they posed as a pimp and a prostitute who were seeking housing and business help. O’Keefe’s approach did not adhere to traditional standards of journalism, bearing a closer resemblance to the methods pioneered by Sacha Baron Cohen. In a visit to an Acorn office in Baltimore, O’Keefe and Giles politely introduced themselves as having “kind of a unique life situation.” As Acorn employees solicitously offered them routine small-business advice (file a 1099 tax form, look for deductions), O’Keefe and Giles slowly revealed what their unique life situation entailed, then presented an unorthodox business plan: to smuggle a number of underage Salvadoran girls into the country, with the goal of sexually enslaving them. The Acorn employees were, alarmingly, unalarmed by the proposal. “My job is not to judge people,” one of them told O’Keefe and Giles. (New Yorker)
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/05/24/100524fa_fact_meadThe New Yorker's rigorous fact-checking protocols are legendary. Yet in this case, a discredited myth was smuggled in as fact. By the time the story was published, the pimp suit claim had been thoroughly debunked by more than one independent investigation and several media outlets.
O'Keefe never wore a pimp suit to the ACORN offices, though his videos were edited to give the impression that he did. O'Keefe never even told ACORN workers he was a pimp. All available evidence suggests that he posed as the clean-cut student boyfriend of "prostitute" Hannah Giles, who was supposedly looking for help fleeing her abusive pimp.
more:
http://bigthink.com/ideas/20217
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